I was punching the buttons on my car radio when one of my favorite Who songs – “Substitute” – came on. I hadn’t heard it in a long while. It was the Live at Leeds version, full of power and noise. As a college student, I had always regarded it as a commentary on adolescent crushes. Now, after being in the education field for the past five years, my outlook had changed, and I recalled my days as a substitute teacher, before becoming a full timer.

It was always fun to stand in front of a classroom and watch the kids as they came in. The minute they saw me, their little pre-adolescent faces would light up: “A substitute!” It never took much time to pinpoint the troublemakers; they would walk right up to me, shake my hand, and introduce themselves.

I learned, very quickly, not to smile and to talk in a loud, business-like voice. I always kept a stern, no-nonsense look on my face, and my school of pirhuanas would quickly turn into a roomful of guppies.

When I subbed, I usually wound up teaching in a middle school or high school. It could be urban or suburban, but the kids were basically the same. One middle school teacher told me, “I think the sixth graders change the most during the year. In September, they’re sweethearts, very eager to please. By June, they’ve become maniacs driven by raging hormones.”

What I found refreshing was the guileless candidness of most kids. One boy in a study hall, who noticed my last name was the same as a classmate’s, asked me, “Are you Charlie Ackerman’s father?”

“No,” I said.

He looked at my head of brown and gray hair and asked, quite seriously, “Are you his grandfather?”

Another class – that I had two days in a row – I broke into four teams and assigned a history report to each group. I also said that if there were any artists, they could illustrate the report on the chalkboard as the other team members gave it. There was only one artist, and as her team gave their report on voting in the early 1800’s, she illustrated on the board people going into voting booths. All the early Americans she drew had the big noses and floppy feet of the Don Martin/MAD magazine style.

One of the perils of substitute teaching is not always being able to prepare – or “prep” – for a class. The sub is usually thrown in with the lions with nothing between him and them but a brief lesson plan. One time I turned up for a music class with no lesson plan to be found anywhere. What to do with forty young people?

My plan was simple. I would play the one song I knew best on the piano that everyone was familiar with. I was going to put the boys on one side, singing, “Doo doo doo/doo-doo! Doo doo doo/doo-doo!”

While the boys were singing that, I’d have the girls sing, “Louie, Louie! Oh, baby now! We gotta go! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

Luckily, someone showed up with the lost lesson plan in the nick of time.

I was once stuck three afternoons in a row with a last-period class of rambunctious sixth graders.  One teacher explained to me that “They’re a little attention deficit, and the school doesn’t know what to do with them, so they lumped them all into one class.”

I assigned them a handout to read for homework on slavery in America, knowing full well that they probably wouldn’t even look at it. So, I read it myself that night; they needed to know this information. Next day, I went over the main points, and – sure enough – very few had even glanced at it.

“So, when slaves tried to escape, they were whipped, and then their owners threw salt on the wounds to make them burn, and then rubbed it in with corncobs to really make it hurt,” I lectured.

“Too much information!” exclaimed one young lady, holding up her hands.

“No,” I argued, “There's no such thing as too much information.”

One December, I had to substitute for a first grade teacher. One first grade teacher told me, “It’s so rewarding to take these young minds at the beginning of the year, and in a few months have them reading and writing and doing arithmetic.” I had to agree that the tots were charming.

It was a real joy, but also had it’s own challenges. One girl began to cry at one point. What was wrong? She pointed to the boy next to her, and said, “He gave me a dirty look and hurt my feelings!”

Half an hour later, in the middle of an arithmetic problem, the kids started holding their noses and moving their little chairs away from one of their classmates. “Ernie farted!” one of them told me.

Twenty minutes later, a boy dropped his pencil. It rolled under a bookcase, and the whole class got up to help him look for it.

I showed them a magic trick where I ripped up a piece of paper and pretended to magically put it back together. They were amazed. They were so amazed that they all attempted to do the same thing and began ripping up paper. There was a lot of confetti made before I was able to stop them.

In the afternoon, I took them down to the auditorium for the school’s holiday show. I had to keep an eye on these young ones. Counting heads at one point, there were twenty-one. Ten minutes later, I counted their chairs and found only twenty. I counted heads again. Twenty-one. Then I saw that two little girls, best friends, were sharing a chair. They were so small they could easily fit into one seat.

“Subbing” is good basic training for any teacher. It forces you to think on your feet and ad-lib when the situation demands it. It is the educational equivalent of jumping into a pool of ice-cold water. Best of all, it makes you realize how rewarding teaching can be.